Paradigm via The Chinese Room

Accolade-winning narrative exploration game Love Esther will be fabricated free on Steam for its 10th anniversary, per a press release from Uk-based developer The Chinese Room earlier today. The game (normally priced at $nine.99 USD) will be available to download from its Steam page from February xiv to 15. The release is also beingness used to promote The Chinese Room's upcoming game, Footling Orpheus, due out on March 1.

Originally released every bit a free-to-play Source engine mod, Honey Esther was officially released on February 14, 2022. The game sees players wandering an isle they are given no proper noun for, just tasked with finding alphabetic character fragments around the isle written past an unknown man to his every bit unknown, but deceased, wife. Each letter fragment corresponds with the area in the map it was institute in, grounding these fictional memories with visual elements for players to experience themselves. Equally the game progresses, players get to see more of the story between the couple and other residents of the island, with the game ultimately leaving the player to figure out what happened for themselves, with multiple playthroughs of the relatively short narrative beingness rewarded with dissimilar audio fragments providing different perspectives on the same event.

The original mod and final version of the game are both honour winners in their own rights, with the mod winning the Best World/Story award at IndieCade'due south Independent Game Awards, and the final game capturing several awards, such as Excellence in Visual Arts at the 2022 Independent Games Festival and All-time Utilize of Narrative at the Develop Awards, also as five BAFTA nominations the same year.